2.1.33 to 2.1.37

Principal evidence of travels Remains There are few material remains of Columbus's travels. Efforts to find the Spaniards' first settlement on Hispaniola have so far failed, but the present-day fishing village of Bord de Mer de Limonade (near Cap-Ha�tien, Haiti) may be close to the original site, and a Taino chieftain's settlement has been identified nearby. Concepción de la Vega, which Columbus founded on the second voyage, may be the present La Vega Vieja, in the Dominican Republic. Remains at the site of La Isabela are still to be fully excavated, as are those at Sevilla la Nueva, Jamaica, where Columbus's two caravels were beached on the fourth voyage. The techniques of skeletal paleopathology and paleodemography are being applied with some success to determine the fates of the native populations. Written sources The majority of the surviving primary sources about Columbus are not private diaries or missives; instead, they were intended to be read by other people. There is, then, an element of manipulation about them—a fact that must be borne fully in mind for their proper understanding. Foremost among these sources are the journals written by Columbus himself for his sovereigns—one for the first voyage, now lost though partly reconstructed; one for the second, almost wholly gone; and one for the third, which, like the first, is accessible through reconstructions made by using later quotations. Each of the journals may be supplemented by letters and reports to and from the sovereigns and their trusted officials and friends, provisioning decrees from the sovereigns, and, in the case of the second voyage, letters and reports of letters from fellow voyagers (especially Michele da Cuneo, Diego Alvarez Chanca, and Guillermo Coma). There is no journal and only one letter from the fourth voyage, but a complete roster and payroll survive from this, alone of all the voyages; in addition, an eyewitness account survives that has been plausibly attributed to Columbus's younger son, Ferdinand (born c. 1488), who traveled with the admiral. Further light is thrown upon the explorations by the so-called Pleitos de Colón, judicial documents concerning Columbus's disputed legacy. A more recent discovery is a copybook that purportedly contains five narrative letters and two personal ones from Columbus, all previously unknown, as well as additional copies of two known letters—all claimed as authentic. Supplemental narratives include The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus ,which has been attributed to Ferdinand Columbus, the Historia de los Reyes Católicos (c. 1500) of Andrés Bernáldez (a friend of Columbus and chaplain to the archbishop of Sevilla), and the Historia de las Indias ,which was compiled about 1550-63 by Bartolomé de Las Casas (former bishop of Chiapas and a champion of the indigenous people of the Americas).